Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 11, 1895 - Miscellanies, Volume III

LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN
up, not so much in any art, as in the general ars
artium and common base of all creative work ; who
will now dip into painting, and now study counter-
point, and anon will be inditing a sonnet : all these
with equal interest, all often with genuine know-
ledge. And of this temper, when it stands alone, I
find it difficult to speak ; but I should counsel such
an one to take to letters, for in literature (which
drags with so wide a net) all his information may be
found some day useful, and if he should go on as he
has begun, and turn at last into the critic, he will
have learned to use the necessary tools. Lastly we
come to those vocations which are at once decisive
and precise ; to the men who are born with the love
of pigments, the passion of drawing, the gift of
music, or the impulse to create with words, just as
other and perhaps the same men are born with the
love of hunting, or the sea, or horses, or the turning-
lathe. These are prycdestined ; if a man love the
labour of any trade, apart from any question of
success or fame, the gods have called him. He may
have the general vocation too : he may have a taste
for all the arts, and I think he often has ; but the
mark of his calling is this laborious partiality for
one, this inextinguishable zest in its technical suc-
cesses, and (perhaps above all) a certain candour of
mind, to take his very trifling enterprise with a
gravity that would befit the cares of empire, and to
think the smallest improvement worth accomplishing
at any expense of time and industry. The book,
the statue, the sonata, must be gone upon with the
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